[Cryptography] Chaum Has a Plan to End the Crypto War

[arxlight]

Call me crazy but there have been times past were I have wondered if
Chaum wasn't one of the worst things that has happened to cryptography.
 Or at least the effective merger of cryptography and finance, which is
maybe the same thing.

Now we have what amounts to the Chaumian "Star Chamber."  I'm not sure
exactly how I feel about that, except that all I need to start
distrusting "trusted councils" is to watch what the permanent members of
the United Nations Security Council end up voting unanimously on.

Lots of questions crop up.

Will the council members be controlled by nation-states?  (Hint: even if
they are not, they are.  See below).

Will the council members be bound by policy guidelines?  The same policy
guidelines for each member? Who will develop these guidelines?
Democratically elected legislators?  Good look getting 9 of those to
agree on policy language.  That observation alone tells me the answer to
"democratically elected legislators?" is "no."

How will choice of law be handled?  Anti-Semitic speech is "legally
evil" in many jurisdictions (carries the potential for criminal
liability), but not (for example) the United States.  Is anti-Semitic
speech "generally recognized as evil"?

Will the council members themselves be democratically elected? (Hah.)

Will the council members generally represent law enforcement?  If so,
will they be overseen by public advocates?  The judiciary?  Which
judiciary?  This is even an absurd question to ask.  In reality law
enforcement can attempt to compel any council member in its jurisdiction
to turn over its key material.  Destroying that key material to avoid
that disclosure looks a lot like spoliation.  Pretending such an entity
(the council member) to be independent of law enforcement or a national
intelligence service is a silly bit of fiction.

Will the council members be required to make their deliberations public?
 What if a council member is presented with a National Security Letter
preventing that?

For that matter, what exactly do we mean by "generally recognized as
evil"?  Is Google "generally recognized as evil" now?  Also, this term
is a misnomer.  Chaum actually means "universally recognized as evil" or
"unanimously recognized as evil," with respect to the council members,
at least according to the text posted by Mr. Baker.

It all sounds very 1990s era X.509 to me.

Perhaps now is a good time to coin the term "Chaumian Quagmire".

On 07/01/16 05:35, Henry Baker wrote:
> FYI --
> 
> 'Chaum is also building into PrivaTegrity another feature that's sure to be far more controversial: a carefully controlled backdoor that allows anyone doing something "generally recognized as evil" to have their anonymity and privacy stripped altogether.'